Mark Moran’s black and white film series capturing quiet, instinctive encounters with strangers, where mood, light, and subtlety take precedence over spectacle.
Mark Moran is a portrait and documentary photographer working with 35mm and medium format film in North Wales. Photography has followed him like a shadow through other creative pursuits—drawing, painting, making—each driven by the same impulse to express mood and form. In black and white film he’s found a natural fit: a slow, deliberate process where light becomes the brush and the darkroom, the canvas.
His portraits lean towards the understated and quietly expressive—ordinary people met on instinct, framed by subdued light and stripped of artifice. Avoiding spectacle, Moran seeks out flat light and low-contrast scenes, places where tones can quietly speak and subtlety carries weight. For him, film is not about capturing the world as it is, but as he imagines it: drawn in blacks and greys, rendered with care, and finished by hand.